Hot Docs 2012: Reviews #8

Reviews of screenings from the 2012 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Fighting Back (Dir: John Kastner, 85 minutes, Canada)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. There's something awful about the death of a child, of potential lost, dreams unrealized. At the turn of the 1980's, there were big advances being made in the treatment of cancer, but for children diagnosed with leukemia the outlook was not good. This film follows several families in London, Ontario as they face up to the grim facts. The bright hope is Tony Coutinho, 16, who has been in remission for several years, and his presence brings comfort to a group of parents who have gathered together for mutual support.

The greatest focus is on thirteen-year-old Michael Cluff, a class clown and devoted follower of Steve Martin. With so much energy and joy in life it seems simply unbelievable that he is gravely ill, and as the cancer takes over his bloodstream he seems to burn with an intense flame.

As we watch those and other stories unfold with grim precision, the film touches on a lot of other issues. Most notably, coming at the time when Kübler-Ross was first coming in vogue, is the question of how much should a child know about their medical condition? Should they be told they are dying? If parents think a child shouldn't be told, should authorities be forced to comply with that? This exact scenario unfolds in front of us, with a hospital social worker over-riding the wishes of Michael's parents and tell him more about his prognosis than they wanted. The movie also looks at the enormous pressures this work places on the medical staff whose work involves around dying children.

It's a crushing film that evokes rage and anguish. But it's also an extraordinarily empathetic account that gives us a chance to understand, without manipulative sensationalism, what these families are going through. Even if it's tough to "like", it's a powerful and unforgettable film — one of the few times where I saw a filmmaker nod sympathetically when an audience sat in silence rather than applauding as the film ended.

This was also a moving close to the festival's "Focus On" retrospective, and as with the other entries, Kastner's engaging presence to talk about his work truly enhanced the presentations. Hot Docs at its best.

Pushwagner (Dir: August B. Hanssen/Even Benestad, 68 minutes, Norway)

Terje Brofos, who works under the nom de guerre Pushwagner, wants nothing to do with a polite, mainstream Norwegian life. That much is obvious from his drawings and paintings, which create a vision of banal bourgeois respectability melding into the grim facelessness of an identity-crushing hive-mind, rows upon rows of identically-dressed businessmen marching like cogs in some brave new world.

That palpable dislike of polite society extends into Brofos' life as well, and his ingrained disrespectful iconoclasm seems like more than a façade. That could make him, as people say, "authentic" — a romantic figure who is living his art. It could also make him a pampered jerk, someone who is indulged by a constant series of acolytes to the point where he can generally act as he sees fit without being called to account.

As the film progresses, we see several sides of Brofos: addict, hardworking artist, petulant control freak, and frail old man. The documentary takes on a self-aware "meta" quality as we see Brofos break the fourth wall and push back against the film crew, made explicit with some scenes of Brofos seated in a control room, attempting to seize power of the process. His desire to be in control makes more sense when we see him involved in court proceedings against a former personal assistant to whom he conveyed thousands of works at a time when he was living on the street, almost certainly drug-addled and quite likely not in a fit mental state to be signing contracts.

That makes Brofos less than a likeable guy throughout, but he does orchestrate an amusing spectacle around him. As a portrait of the artist as an eccentric crank, this does a good job, with the visual style well in sync with its subject.

Screens with: Aaron Burr, Part 2 (Dir: Dana O'Keefe, 8 minutes, USA) which gives the third Vice-President of the United States a chance to reclaim his legacy in a stylish (almost Tarantino-esque) burst. The man who nearly seized the presidency in the "revolutionary" election of 1800 is nearly forgotten today, reduced to a footnote and remembered for one extraordinary event. In this film, Burr's iconoclastic image as a man out of time is cemented with shots of him (in period dress) walking through contemporary New York (where he had been one of the founders of what is now the Chase Manhattan Bank) and across the river in Weehawken, New Jersey, where the site of America's most notorious dual is now an unglamourous parking lot. We even see him trading insults with Alexander Hamilton via text message before speeding off to Mexico in a flashy sports car. A delightful bit of energetic revisionism, this was the best short that I saw at the festival.

The Invisible War (Dir: Kirby Dick, 99 minutes, USA)

The numbers are shocking. One in five women in the American armed forces is sexually assaulted in the time they serve — and those are the numbers for those who make formal reports. The actual numbers are certainly far higher, but there are great disincentives for servicewomen to initiate the process: many who do are punished, stripped of their rank or discharged, and often the authority to whom they would have to report is a peer of the perpetrator — if not the perpetrator himself.

In this meticulous documentary, we are introduced to several women who dare to tell their stories on camera as we are guided through the systemic elements that allow rape and sexual assault to continue. The film also advocates for one specific change in the military justice system: to establish an independent reporting authority outside the chain of command, to reduce the massive discretion that unit commanders have to simply sweep incidents under the rug. There's also a call for a culture change to get past a deeply-ingrained blame-the-victim mentality — "ask her when she's sober" posters are no answer.

But for all the powerful strength we see from the women profiled in the film, and the positive momentum of a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style ending, there's still the lingering sense that the film doesn't cut deep enough. There's a stronger critique of the hierarchical/patriarchal militaristic structure to be made that the film shies away from, as well as the myriad ways that mindset seeps into the wider American consciousness. Any institution — and any society — that is blithely accepting of the idea that rape is an "occupational hazard" for women serving their country is badly broken and violating the most elementary principles of liberty and justice.